After the rightfully diplomatic D Day commemoration, another event to remember is the war crime at Oradour. If you are reading this today, June 10, it is exactly 70 years ago that German troops heading north to repel the landings took time out to gather up all the villagers of innocent little French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. They put the women and kids in the church and the men in barns, there to grenade and machine gun to death 642 of them, loot the village and leave it in flames.

It’s a sad story not told enough in the Anglo-Saxon world. Nearly 500 non combatants who never lived past that Saturday 70 years ago today. I have added the village/museum/memorial, call it what you will, to my bucket list.

Interesting (pop culture note) that Mel Gibson made the Brits do something similar to a bunch of innocent colonists in a church in his dumb movie The Patriot. By making atrocities commonplace he lessens the shock and horror of when these sick things really happen.

You can only imagine — I can only imagine — what it must have been like inside that church for those minutes, with the already dead and the screaming, dismembered, disembowelled soon to be so. Not a lone gunman, nor a nutty husband and wife team; not a vengeful employee, not a agonised teenager with in need of inpatient mental care, but a bunch of men, some with kids of their own who went along with the order, presumably under threat of something similar happening to them if they refused.

Aspiring novelist. Avid reader of fiction. Reviewer of books. By day, my undercover identity is that of meek, mild-mannered legal assistant, Kate Loveton, working in the confines of a stuffy corporate law office; by night, however, I'm a super hero: Kate Loveton, Aspiring Novelist and Spinner of Tales. My favorite words are 'Once upon a time... ' Won't you join me on my journey as I attempt to turn a hobby into something more?